Shirley Leung

• What burnout at work is - and how it's different from what you might expect. (13:08)
• What it feels like to burn out, and what she experienced first hand when Shirley did. (5:49)
• Things you can do to avoid burnout or to bounce back from it. (15:36)
• Curious facts and opinions that Shirley has about multitasking and about why it may not be so beneficial. (14:23)
• When Shirley was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, her coworkers came through for her in a big way. (26:48)

FRANK BLAKE: Well, this is such a treat. Hello Shirley, and welcome to Crazy Good Turns.

Where's this interview find you now?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: I am in Milton, Massachusetts, and just south of Boston, as you know, because you grew up in Boston and Brookline.

Do you root for the Patriots, and the Red Sox, and the Celtics, all our teams?

FRANK BLAKE: I do, I do. Yeah, that never leaves you.

You may leave Boston, but you keep the sports teams.

You're the host of the Say More podcast, which is the Boston Globe, which is the major newspaper in Boston, its podcast, I take it.

You're the host of that podcast, correct?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Yes. And it's once a week, and as you know Boston, and as being a city full of ideas, and people with ideas, and innovators and thought leaders.

So, it's a chance to do an extensive interview once a week, one-on-one with these big thinkers of Boston, and it's great.

I also write a column for the Globe, I've been a business columnist for more than a decade.

I've spent my 30 years in journalism as a business journalist, so it's exciting to talk to you, a former CEO of Home Depot.

So, this is great.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, I'm looking forward to it.

And where I start with my questions is, I imagine, as the host of your podcast, you have a lot of potential topics to talk about.

There are a lot of interesting things happening in your town every day, every minute.

And what brought your podcast to our attention was the series you did on burnout.

So, maybe explain to our listeners a little bit why you picked that topic, and you devoted several parts of your series to that, correct?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Yes.

So, we decided to launch a series, a podcast series, and we're sitting around thinking about what topic.

And I was thinking, "I'd love to do something on burnout. I'd love to do something on burnout."

And we did a five-part series on burnout.

And I had been wrestling with this issue of burnout since the fall of 2020.

Think back to that time, it's a pandemic-

FRANK BLAKE: Right, COVID. Yep.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: COVID. And at the time, my kids were I think six and eight, first and third grade, then second and fourth grade by the fall of 2020.

And schools were let out in the spring of 2020, so they were home and homeschooled on Zoom.

I was home working and writing stories.

If you think about it, back then, the pandemic, yes, it was a public health crisis, but it was also an economic crisis.

So, I was one of the lead reporters writing about all the millions of people who lost jobs, all the thousands of businesses that were scrambling for loans when the economy shut down.

So, this was probably the biggest story of my career, and I'm on the front lines.

And so, I was exhausted, and by the fall of 2020 I had hit rock bottom.

I just did not feel like, um… I felt lethargic, I felt blah, I just didn't feel like working.

I mean, to me that was the real key.

For the first time in my life work felt like work, and that was a different feeling for me.

FRANK BLAKE: And I take it this must have been for some extended period of time to differentiate it from just normal stress, or normal feelings of being overwhelmed.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Yeah. I felt physically, I didn't feel like working, I couldn't think straight, I didn't know what was going on.

And I actually went to see the doctor and they did a lot of blood work.

But finally I was just, and I don't think I was alone in this, and I finally said out loud to my bosses that, "I think I'm burned down. I think I need a break, I think I need to slow down."

And if you think about it, we're all working remotely at this time so it's hard to tell somebody, or to tell if someone isn't producing.

I mean, to my bosses on the outside, my byline is still in the-

FRANK BLAKE: Everything was fine, yeah.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Right, everything was fine.

And I was thinking back, I didn't take a break, I didn't take leave of absence or anything.

And it just felt incredible just to say out loud and to acknowledge to my bosses, "I need help. I need a break from time to time."

And I think that was important.

And if you remember back to those moments, a lot of people started doing that.

We started to bring our whole selves to work.

We were not afraid of losing our jobs if we said out loud, "I need a break, I need to slow down, I need help."

And I also even said to my bosses, "Listen, childcare is out of whack. The schools, there's no longer after-school care," during the pandemic, the early days of the pandemic, a lot of daycares are shuttered.

So, a lot of us ended up hiring individual babysitters, and our costs skyrocket when you had to bring individuals into your home, even just for a few hours a day to take care of your children.

That was a cost that a lot of us didn't anticipate.

And so, our company ended up giving us money to help defray some of those costs.

FRANK BLAKE: How did you navigate through your burnout?

So, first is talking about it, but how do you navigate through that, having talked about it and realizing that it's something that's happened?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Right. I mean, I started to take more breaks on my own.

I got up and started, because you're glued to our seats.

And before, you would have a commute.

You would get up, leave your house, you'd take the train. And then I started to build in walks, and a lot of people started doing this, 30 minute, 45 minute walks.

I used to never walk the dog, and so I started walking the dog religiously every afternoon.

I made sure that I got out of the house, I walked, I got fresh air.

And this is the time where I fell in love with podcasts, ironically.

I did not listen to podcasts regularly before the pandemic, but then on my walks I would start listening to podcasts.

And that's how I fell in love.

And when things got more normal, and when we got back to a little bit more normal life, I was like, "You know what? I'd like to do a podcast."

And so, I've been doing this podcast now for a little more over the year.

But the series allowed me to really delve into how to deal with my burnout

FRANK BLAKE: ... first question is when you decide to do a series about this, is it because you talk about your burnout and you're getting lots of verification from others that they're going through the same thing, and that this is a real issue?

Or what's the process that makes you decide, "I'm going to set aside several issues to talk about this"?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: I mean, because I have a column at the Globe I did actually write about, at one time early on, finding purpose at work, because again, I went back to this issue of work felt like work for the first time.

And so, to make sure that I had purpose at work, or purpose at work, purpose in life, because I think purpose is what drives us.

Purpose is what gets us out of bed every day, and gives us the energy and then the passion.

And so, that was first level setting. "Okay, no, I like what I do. I like being a columnist, I like being a journalist, and there is purpose in that."

A lot of times for journalists, we find stories from our own lives, and from our own colleagues, and I could tell from work, and I can tell from the sources I connect with that a lot of people were in the same boat.

After the pandemic, after seeing so many people die during the pandemic, it really forced all of us to think about, "Is this what I want to do right now?"

The pandemic reminded us of our mortality.

And so, it's like the time I have left, is this what I really want to do? And you start to see people retire, switch jobs.

And so, for me it was figuring out, "Well, how do I make sure that I'm living the life I want, I'm doing the kind of work I want?"

And so, it made me think about burnout at a different level.

And once I said it out loud to my colleagues at work or to my team putting together the podcasts, they're like, "Yes, that's a universal topic, especially after the pandemic."

Everybody can relate to this.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. So, there are many paths you could have taken in this series.

How did you decide what topics to cover and whom to interview?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: So, we wanted to have a doc, because this is Boston. It's a town full of doctors.

And so, we were so lucky to get in touch with, we were so lucky to get in touch with Aditi Nerurkar, who is a doctor at Harvard Medical School.

And she'd just written a book called "The Five Resets," and she had this, and we were really lucky to find her and to get to know her, because she spent her, really, medical career on the topic of burnout, because she herself was burned out when she was a resident.

And she talks about how she was a resident, it was beyond regular stress, and she almost couldn't breathe.

She talks about the feeling of like a stampede of horses on her chest.

And so, that's when she went to see a doctor, "What's going on?"

And they did a battery of tests. And her doctor says, "Well, congratulations. It's just stress."

And she's like, "Take some time off, take a vacation, go to the spa."

And so she did that, but she was really bothered by that prescription, because she's like, "It's more than that, it's more than just self-care."

And so, she ended up dedicating her career to learning more about stress, and what stresses us, and how to address it.

And as she says, "I wanted to become the doctor that I needed at that time."

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, interesting. Yeah.

So, if you take our listeners through your series, what kinds of things do you think they'll learn?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Right. So Dr. Nerurkar introduced me, Dr. Nerurkar introduced me to this concept of the new burnout.

She said the old burnout was you're listless, and you can't get out of bed.

And she said the new burnout that she's seen that's come out of the pandemic is this idea that you can't disconnect from your devices. You are always on.

And that is a function of many of us are able to work from home these days.

And so, you are constantly connected to work.

I don't know if you remember this phrase during that period when a lot of people were working from home is like, 'Are we working from home or are we living at work?"

FRANK BLAKE: Right, exactly.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: And so, she made me really think about disconnecting from work.

And then I also got to know this MIT trained computer scientist named Cal Newport.

And do you know Cal? He's a productivity expert-

FRANK BLAKE: I don't, no.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: He is fantastic.

He teaches computer science at Georgetown, he has his podcast, I think he has three kids-

FRANK BLAKE: Highly productive human being.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: A highly productive human being.

He also writes for the New Yorker, writes books-

He studies how technology has changed the way humans work.

And really, he talked to me about how our society right now, they want humans to be like computers and to be like robots, the idea of more, better, faster.

And he's like, "No, no, no, no, no. We have to do fewer things. We are humans, we have to work at a natural pace, we have to do fewer things, and we have to obsess over quality. That's the name of the game."

And I love talking to Cal, because what drove him to rethink productivity and our notion of productivity is because he's a working father.

He was a parent of, at the time, three young boys, and he's like, "I wanted to spend more time with my boys. I didn't want to choose between work and my family."

And that's a place I come from too.

My kids are 11 and 13, and I want to see them grow up, I want to be part of their lives.

So, how do I strike that right balance where I can be an incredible, I can be productive and do high quality work for my employer and my readers, but also be there and be present for my family and for my boys.

And so, just one other person I'll mention is Krista Tippett, she's a podcaster of On Being.

And she taught me the power of quiet. The power of being quiet.

The power of silence.

So, Krista Tippett, she's a podcaster on-

FRANK BLAKE: Yep, follow her. Yep.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: ... and she taught me the power of being quiet, the power of silence.

And so, now one of the things I do is when I'm in my car running errands, I won't turn on the radio.

I won't always reach for that podcast to fill my ears.

I appreciate just silence, I appreciate just nature, I appreciate sometimes sitting on my deck and listening to the birds.

That is a break from our highly connected world, and that's really important.

FRANK BLAKE: Yep. So, what kind of feedback did you get from the episodes?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: I think a lot of people, they felt seen that burnout is real.

And the feedback is that they were starting to do this on their own, starting to be quiet, as Krista would say, and appreciate silence.

And one of the things, it's not just burnout from work.

I mean, my focus was an affliction of knowledge workers, because a lot of us are in this hybrid work or total remote work.

I mean, I often start my days at 6:30 in the morning I'm checking my email, and some days I have to remind myself, "Okay, you don't need to be on at 6:30."

Or we're on at 6:30 at night or 8:30 at night after dinner.

And so, I think a lot of people realize there is such a thing as working too much, and it can be bad and counterproductive.

So, I think a lot of us are in that same boat.

And I think also right now we live in a time of incredibly polarized politics in this country.

And so, people are really on edge over this election.

And so, I think people need to be reminded how to just take a deep breath and take a moment for themselves.

So, I got a lot of good feedback.

FRANK BLAKE: Was there anything that particularly surprised you that was something, "Oh, I didn't expect to hear that"?

Or, "That's a different angle than I had thought about"?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: I mean, I guess I was surprised about, from Cal, telling us that we need to work at a natural pace, that that needs to be valued.

Because it's true, because we are living with so many devices now, so much technology and now artificial intelligence, we feel like we have to keep up with the robots now.

And I think his mantra that we humans bring something different to the table, we are still special and we need to tap into that.

And maybe it's not doing more, not doing faster, it's doing better, and if we slow down we can actually do better.

And I think that was a very powerful message for me.

Also, I learned that multitasking, along the same lines, multitasking is bad.

I used to pride myself on multitasking.

I'm up in the morning, I've done three loads of laundry before 8:00, I'm doing laundry throughout the day while I'm interviewing CEOs, and delivering a very thoughtful column.

Or I've done a very provocative or thoughtful, thought-provoking podcast interview, and now I realize, no, no, no, no, I can't do my best work if I'm distracted.

And so, now I try to concentrate my laundry.

I don't do laundry every day, because it takes away.

Little by little, it takes from your best work. And so, now I'm trying not to multitask.

I was introduced to a concept called mono-tasking.

Actually, I haven't done everything that I was taught during my burnout series, which is this idea, try to do one thing for 30 minutes.

Don't check Slack, don't check your texts, don't check the website.

Can you sit down for 30 minutes and do one thing?

It's actually really hard, but you could probably do your best work if you're able to do that.

FRANK BLAKE: That's interesting.

This is more a theoretical or conceptual question for you, but you may have unique insights on it.

On AI, because you referenced it, do you think that that is going to lead to lower burnout?

Because all of that tedious work is being done by machine, and machine learning?

Or, a little bit from your comment as well, actually more anxiety, more difficulty because you're trying to keep up with the machine.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: So, for AI, it depends on what role you have and what job you have.

But let me just talk about being a journalist.

We actually were just discussing this the other day at work on how we use AI.

And for me, I use AI almost every day.

For example, when I'm writing and I'm like, "That lede," the lede is the first sentence that the sense that's supposed to grab the readers.

Sometimes I'll write a lede, and I'm not having AI write the lede for me, but I'll put it in ChatGPT or something called, I learned the other day, Perplexity, as like, "How can this sentence be better?"

And so, they'll spit some out ideas, and usually the sentence isn't better, but it might spark an idea.

Like a word that he didn't think about.

I was like, "Oh, that's a good word I should use maybe in the lede now."

And so, I use it every day, or sometimes when I have a sentence it's like, "Is it is? Or is it are?"

I used to just call up a colleague or call up a human, but that's a task that I can use AI for.

And so, if you know how to use it, it can help the humans be better.

And there are certain tasks now when I write a story and it gets posted online, there are certain production tasks, like you got to put in the photo, you got to put in related links or related stories, that we should be able to train the AI to do.

I shouldn't have to do that.

Or when you're writing headlines, what's the better headline?

Then the human, instead of writing the first draft of the headline, maybe the AI writes the first headlines and the human becomes the editor of the AI-

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, polishes it. Yeah.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Polishes it, perfects it, figures out which one is better.

And so, there's a way to use AI to a human's advantage.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. Well, we all hope that that's exactly right.

What topics do you want to take on next?

Do you have some things that are in the back of your head? "Okay, I'm going to do another multi-episode set of podcasts"?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Yeah, we're thinking about cancer.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, wow. Okay.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Boston, as you know, we are an epicenter of cancer research.

We have Dana Farber here, one of the premier medical institutions and research institutions dedicated to understanding and treating cancer.

I'm a cancer survivor. I had breast cancer seven years ago, five years later I'm in the clear.

And you probably know a lot of people who've had cancer.

And it was sparked by someone I'm interviewing who wrote a book about cancer, his name is Larry Ingrassia.

I used to work with him at the Wall Street Journal.

You might know the Ingrassia brothers, Paul Ingrassia was a big Wall Street Journal editor.

And so, Paul's passed away from cancer, he had multiple cancers in his life.

And Larry just wrote a book called Fatal Inheritance, and it's about all the cancer that went through his family.

His mother died of breast cancer when she was in her 40s, his two sisters died of cancer in their 20s and 30s.

And then Paul Ingrassia, his older brother, died of cancer.

Now, he died of cancer, I think maybe 69, late 60s.

His father did not die of cancer, but Larry and his father were the only two that did not die of cancer in their immediate family.

And so, he wanted to explore why.

And it's tied to a certain gene, a mutation of a gene that his mother had, and passed it along to three of Larry's siblings.

So, Larry was the only one that did not have this mutation.

And so, he wrote a book about, it's such a good book, it's so powerful, about the history of cancer.

The history of cancer that went through his family.

And after reading his book, I was like, "We need to do a cancer series."

I mean, think about the people who have survived cancer, like me, who, people whose families have gone through cancer.

And you probably know this, think about the people who have cancer, are living with cancer, and are working through cancer.

I can't even imagine.

I didn't have to go through chemo with my breast cancer, but the number of people you know who have cancer, are going through chemo, and still are working, and it's amazing and it's so resilient.

And so, that's what I want to take on next.

And the doctors, I mean, think about all the doctors in Boston-

FRANK BLAKE: No, that's a very great topic-

SHIRLEY LEUNG: ... who are researching cancer.

FRANK BLAKE: ... that's a great topic.

As a reporter and writer, are there other reporters and writers who you think aren't getting enough exposure, and who you find fascinating right now that you'd say for our listeners, "Another person you ought to be listening to or reading is"?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Well, I'm selfish, I work at the Boston Globe.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, fair enough.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: And so, I love my colleagues at the Globe, and if you haven't been reading what's been happening, we have this spotlight team, a very famous spotlight team, investigative team.

And we've been writing about Steward, S-T-E-W-A-R-D, Steward Healthcare.

And it's a hospital system around the country-

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, that's been in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe.

They have hospitals around the country, and they are these often community hospitals owned by private equity.

And we've been doing this terrific yearlong series about the consequences of what happens when private equity gets into healthcare, takes on these hospitals, and how they stripped a lot of these hospitals, what's happened to the patients in Massachusetts.

We are in the process of closing a bunch of these hospitals that Steward Healthcare had.

And so, if you have not heard of Steward Healthcare, there is probably a Steward Hospital in your community, because they bought hospitals across the country.

You should read the series, subscribe to the Globe-

FRANK BLAKE: There you go.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: ... and read our series from the Globe Spotlight team.

It's not the same members of the team, but the Globe Spotlight team was most famous for taking on the Catholic Church and exposing the abuse, widespread abuse in the Catholic Church.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. I remember the movie anyways.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Yes.

FRANK BLAKE: So, I ask this for everyone who appears to everyone who appears on the podcast, who is someone that's done a crazy good turn for you?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: So, I want to talk about when I had cancer, breast cancer, and that was very early stage but I had a mastectomy.

My kids at the time were 4 and 6, so young. And I was 45 years old.

And when you have cancer, you have a new appreciation for your friends, your colleague, for strangers, for humanity, because everyone comes out the woodwork and helps you.

People donated so that my family could have meals, and my colleagues came over and babysat my kids.

I had people I barely met who would send me care packages.

So, something as horrible as cancer brought out the good in people.

And so now, seven years later when someone has cancer, I'm giving back.

I pay it forward.

Unfortunately, cancer is so widespread that every year I'm giving hundreds of dollars to friends, to strangers, to help them through their cancer journey, whether it's sometimes they have to take time off work, sometimes they have to pay for treatment.

I mean, it's happening right now.

We have a student journalist, Brianne Kovach, she was at the Globe for six months.

She's 25 years old and she has breast cancer. Her mom had it a year ago, and we just started a GoFundMe.

I've never met Brianne, but I know her byline.

And so, all of us are giving to help her and her family.

And so, I just love this circle of, I don't know what you call it, but you've probably experienced this, right?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, of course.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: People just come out of the woodwork to help when you're sick.

And so, I just love that about, I don't know, about humanity. It gives me hope.

FRANK BLAKE: Yep. Well, that's a lot what this podcast is about.

So thank you, Shirley, thank you for participating. And I know our listeners have really enjoyed this discussion.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Thank you, Frank. I love this idea for a podcast.

FRANK BLAKE: So final question, if people want to learn more about you, where should they go?

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Well, you can go to the Boston Globe and subscribe to the Globe.

You could subscribe to my podcast called Say More, and you can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts.

On Spotify, on Apple, usually our episodes drop every Thursday.

And so, you can follow me on Threads, Shirley, I think it's 02186. I'm still on Twitter, so you can follow me at L-E-U-N-G.

Also, there's a paywall at the Globe, but not for the podcast. There's no paywall for the podcast.

So, you can go to, I think bostonglobe.com/saymore, or globe.com/saymore and you can find it.

FRANK BLAKE: Perfect. Well, thank you again, Shirley. This has been a delight.

SHIRLEY LEUNG: Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, Frank.